Parenting: Creative Journal for Parents – set up

Today I’ve finally received the book on guided parenting journalling written by an art therapist Lucia Capacchione! A very interesting and inspiring book. It guides you through your complete journey as a parent.

From looking into the past and identifying your family values and rules, through pregnancy and birth, up to the time of teenage kids and beyond. It is written for all kind of family constellations: natural parents and children, parents who were adopted or in care as children with natural children, natural parents with adopted children (not sure it’s the right way to call the types of parenthood, but I hope no one takes offence and the idea of what I am trying to say is also clear)!

1. Content

Each phase of your parental journey comes with a list of exercises, instructions and examples. I strongly recommend to read though the book and follow the instructions while creating a very personal and quite a therapeutic art journal. This intense form of self-discovery through would be too much for my scrapbooking project. It would be, in my opinion and for my taste, a bit too personal to share with anyone (at least not in its entirety). Instead I am going to take the book as a guide to topics that I want to talk about to my children.

2. Artwork

I will loosely follow the instructions and where it suggests to draw something I will use photos and may be some sort of digital collage. I also decided to use creative common licensed photos from flickr but I will always try to somehow change them to look different from my own photos. I will use them like you would use snippets from printed magazines for your collage. I will start with what ever skills I will get from the Photoshop tutorials listed in my post last week. If I then still feel it’s not enough to allow me to express myself I definitely will do the Digital Art Journalling classes at Get it Scrapped.

3. Templates

I will look for templates that allow for quite a big bit of journalling as this album is likely to be quite story rather picture driven and I really want to do double paged layout with journalling on one page and the art piece on the other. I will look for a 12×12 template but may then re-scale it to fit an 8×8 book… I found this designer who specialises in double sided digital layouts, Yin at simply yin designs. Manadagirlis another designer creating two-page templates, Biograffiti has a nice template too. But then there are the simple Cathy Zielske’s 2 page layouts that would work just fine.

4. Time-line and Frequency

I feel that even if I go with my light-touch approach to this journal it is still may be quite intense emotionally and I may want to spend some time compiling the artwork part of each topic. Hence I think I will start with one topic every three weeks and we’ll how it goes. Maybe I will find that I can do one topic every two weeks or maybe I would need the whole month to complete it.
Another idea to manage the workload and to stay motivated would be to finish journalling in one or two big chunks (I know that I’ll have way more time now in the next three weeks than in March or April) and then focus on artwork tackling one topic at a time. This way it always will feel like I am nearly there and THIS does keep me going!

Whichever way I decide to complete it I will publish all the selected topics and detailed instructions here as well, so if you want you always can join in and complete yours!